Seen in Lower Resolution

It used to be that as we grew older, we’d reminisce about the days we ditched the last few days of class and swam in the river on hot summer nights—no serious bills, no student debt, just the endless, all-consuming worry about whether the person you liked liked you back. Now, instead of riverbanks and cheap perfume, our nostalgia comes filtered through sepia-toned selfies and pixelated LCD soundsystem song lyrics. We look back on the early days of social media, MySpace Top 8s, cryptic AIM away messages, blurry Photobooth pics, and laugh and think how unbranded.

We tell ourselves it wasn’t serious. We weren’t creating content, we were just being. But the truth is, those moments were already laying the foundation for everything we’re living through now. We were learning to curate, to perform, to market ourselves before we even knew what “personal brand” meant. We were teenagers writing code in our MySpace profiles and calling it customization, not design. We were oversharing long before it was a strategy. And sure, we didn’t have follower counts or analytics dashboards, but we still checked obsessively reading between the lines of our passive-aggressive statuses. We were just as desperate to be seen—just in lower resolution.

As social media continues to evolve, one thing becomes increasingly clear. It’s not just a tool anymore—it is the performance. We’re not posting about our lives. We’re posting to prove we’re living one. 

My prediction is as AI continues to create content faster than our overstimulated brains can consume it, we’ll lean harder into “realness.” But not real as in honest. Real as in produced to look raw. Expect professional-grade "candid" selfies, faux-diary captions, and the new frontier algorithm-approved vulnerability. We’ll pretend we’re unplugging by curating content about unplugging. We’ll mistake transparency for intimacy and forget that being seen is not the same as being known.

How do we reclaim something remotely human in this emotionally optimized hellscape?

The answer is quite simple actually. Let yourself get bored. Boredom is where theory is born, where ideas percolate, and where the mind does its best meandering. That existential ache you feel after scrolling for an hour? It’s not failure. It’s friction. It means something inside you is still awake. That might just be your evolutionary advantage.

So no, I don’t know where new anthropology theories come from. But I have a hunch they start somewhere between the comments section of a viral tweet and the long walk home from a brunch where everyone pretended they were doing fine.

Now go. Post less. Think more. And if you must brand yourself, let it be as someone who still believes there’s something real left to say.